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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

301–310 of 570 posts

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#301
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel? Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.

NAT busting, and no key management. What extra dependencies does Tailscale have?

Well, the dependency on Tailscale's servers, for one. You're getting that NAT-busting because Tailscale is running servers to handle that for you, and you're getting around key management by having them manage your keys and overlay their own auth layer for you.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#302
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if your home hypervisor goes down?

Nothing. You probably though I said "VPN over a VPS", which would just be the same as a VPN, which isn't composing the solutions.

You're suggesting to use a VPS in a thread that's specifically about self-hosting on a home network, and about there being cons to that compared to hosting on a cloud/VPS platform.

So you're sort of driving parallel to the existing commentary.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#303
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better, set up Tailscale. It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible. You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with fri…

What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel? Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.

The benefit of Tailscale is that it gives you “lots” of wireguard tunnels that work through NAT with near zero configuration and a central admin interface.

I use a personal plan and have multiple nodes. Desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, docker containers just for me and a couple of raspberry Pis on my families home networks.

Only once have I been “locked out” of a node and that was due to an expired key.

Sure, for just connecting one node to another with a known IP and accessible port it’s overkill, but for anything more complex it an awful lot of awesome for very little effort.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#304
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.

Although not perfect, I added a couple features to help ensure uptime: * LAN components are on a UPS, helps keep continuity between power blips and breaker flips * Dynamic DNS, cron runs a script 4x per day to ensure a DNS name points to my IP, even if issued a new one by the ISP * Rebooting everything occasionally to ensure the network and services come back up on their own and I didn't make a mistake with some conf…

I run Tailscale on an Apple TV which is on a UPS. The thing uses very little power so the UPS lasts a long, long time.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#305

Emacs chads just keep winning.

Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing. The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed…

People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding.

However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.

The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#307
post #3

Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…

> Again, a little bit odd considering that the *author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS*

I’m pretty sure author just wanted to build PKMS. These types of “oooh, will it be there in 20 years” are standard OCD/procrastination.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd part here is why take it to 100%+ when you can just build a plugin on Obsidian rather than re-building the whole thing? Seems a bit extreme.

In 20 years will that plugin work? I doubt it.

In 20 years you might be dead.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#309
post #231
post #3

Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…

> Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author. Nonetheless, v…

Even simpler, just pay for the feature

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#310
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t even compile stuff from 20 years ago without some extensive archeological efforts. I doubt this is your largest problem by then.

??? I have dozens of projects from 20 years ago that I can compile today.

With respect, I doubt it. Have you tried pulling out a 20 year old tarball and compiling it, without modification, on a modern distro?
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